We put up holiday lights to see how pretty they look when it gets dark.
You want to capture those lights on your camera, but getting them to look right in your pictures can be more of a challenge than you bargained for.
Professional photographers have lot of experience and cameras with all sorts of settings that most of us wouldn’t know what to do with.
Here are three tips for the amateur photographers out there.
- Turn off your flash. If you use a flash, your automatic settings will respond to the light from your flash and your holiday lights won’t show up.
- Use a tripod. You just turned off your flash. That means your camera is going to try to make up for having less light by leaving the lens open longer. This means any tiny movement you make will likely blur your picture. If you have no tripod, improvise. Set your camera on a flat surface and take the picture or lean your body and arms against a tree or car to keep yourself as steady as possible.
- Shoot at dusk, not full dark. Most of the time, you can do better with that little light left in the sky and still see the lights.
Use these tips to take a picture of your holiday lights. Post the picture to Cinnaminson Patch’s Deck the House contest page and you could win $100,000 for the school district.
Want to get more technical than that? Here are some other resources for taking holiday photographs.
- New York Institute of Photography
- MacWorld
- Strobist Blog
- eHow
- Turner Photographics
- Canon
- Snapfish
- Olympus
For more information about the Deck the House contest, click here.
Do that with the above and you'll be impressed with your skills, even with a small point and shoot camera.